Maybe This Time (6 page)

“Uh, thank you.” Andie eyed the tray doubtfully, but the yellow-striped teapot smelled richly of peppermint and there were violets painted on the big striped cup.

Mrs. Crumb nodded. “I put in a little liquor, too. You sleep good now.” She glanced down at the foot of the bed. “Sweet dreams.”

She retreated back through Andie's door, and Andie closed it behind her and sniffed the pot. Minty. Very minty. She sat down on the bed and poured tea into the cup and then took a sip and got a full blast of at least two shots of peppermint schnapps.
Whoa,
she thought. The tea was good and peppermint was always nice, but unless Mrs. Crumb was trying to put her into a schnapps-induced stupor, the housekeeper had an exaggerated idea of “a little liquor.”

Maybe she should make her own tea.

She began to read Kristin's notes, sipping cautiously. The kids' mother had died giving birth to Alice, she read, their father had died in a car accident two years ago, and their aunt had died in a fall four months ago in June.
And now,
Andie thought,
they're alone with Crumb. And me.
That thought was so harrowing that she forgave them the weirdness of their first meeting. Things would get better.

Poor kids.

She sipped more tea and read more notes. The three nannies had all said the same thing: the kids were smart, the kids were undisciplined, the kids were strange, there was something wrong, and they were leaving. Only the last one had tried to take the kids with her, and Alice had gone into such a screaming fit that she'd lost consciousness and the nanny had had to detour to a hospital. After that, the nanny took the kids back to Archer House and left them there. “These children need professional psychological help,” she'd written, and Andie thought,
So North sent me.

That was so unlike him, not to send a professional, not to get a team of experts down there, and she thought,
He's not taking it seriously.
Either that or he wanted her buried in southern Ohio for some reason.

She tilted her head back to think about that and saw the curtain of
the window nearest the bed move, a flutter, as if from a draft. She watched, and when it didn't move again, she shook her head and went through the rest of the folder, sipping the liqueur-spiked tea until the combination of that and the dry curriculum reports from the nannies made her so sleepy, she gave up. She turned off the bedside lamp, and the moonlight seeped into the room—
full moon,
she thought—and it was lovely to be so deeply drowsy on such a soft bed in such soft blue light that she let herself doze, thinking,
I should have called Flo to tell her I arrived, I should have called Will, I should have . . .

Something moved in her peripheral vision, maybe the curtain again, she was pretty sure nothing had moved. Exhaustion or maybe the liqueur in the tea. She looked sleepily around the room, but it was just gloomy and jumbled, a gothic kind of normal, although it seemed colder than it had been, so she let her head fall back and snuggled down into the covers and drifted off to sleep, and then into dreams where there was shadowy laughter and whispering, and someone dancing in the moonlight, and as she fell deeper into sleep, the whispering in her ear grew hot and low—
Who do you love? Who do you want? Who kisses you good night?—
and she saw Will, smiling at her, genial and easygoing with his blond frat-boy good looks, and then she fell deeper and darker, and North was there, his eyes hot, reaching for her the way he used to, demanding and possessive and out of control in love with her, and she sighed in relief from wanting him, and somebody whispered,
Who is HE?,
and she went to him the way she always had—impossible to ever say no to North—and lost herself in him and her dreams.

 

Andie woke at dawn with a headache, which she blamed on Mrs. Crumb's hot tea along with the hot dreams about North, probably evoked because she'd taken his name again.
Guilt will always get you,
she thought and resolved to stop lying, even if it was the only way to defeat Crumb. She took an aspirin and went down and moved the
rest of her things from her car to her room, and then drove fifteen miles into the little town at the end of the road and hit the IGA there for decent breakfast food. Then she headed back to the house, determined to Make a Difference in the kid's lives, but once there, she hit the wall. Alice was in the kitchen demanding breakfast, but she didn't want eggs or toast or orange juice. Alice wanted cereal. She'd had cereal the day before and the day before that and the day before that and today wasn't going to be any damn different. Andie looked into Alice's gray-blue eyes and saw the same stubbornness that had defeated her in her short marriage.

“You're an Archer, all right,” she said and gave Alice her cereal.

Then she made ham and eggs for Carter on the stubborn old stove, thinking of the kitchen North had remodeled for her when she'd moved into his old Victorian in Columbus, of the shining blue quartz counters and soft yellow cabinets and the open shelves filled with her Fiesta ware. It'd been her favorite place in the world, next to their bedroom in the attic. This kitchen was like a meat locker. Very sanitary but . . .

“That is not good,” Alice said, looking into the pan, but when Andie dished it up for Carter, he ate everything. He kept his eyes on his comic book the whole time and then shoved the plate away and left, still reading, but he ate it all. Progress.

“You're welcome,” Andie called to his retreating back, and turned around to see Mrs. Crumb smiling at her, her powdery, jowly face triumphant over Alice's empty cereal bowl as Alice deserted them, too.

Andie ignored her and tried to call Flo using the kitchen phone, staring at the battered white bulletin board that held only a list of faded phone numbers and an even more faded church collection envelope, which probably summed up Mrs. Crumb's life. When she couldn't get a dial tone, she said, “No phone?” and Mrs. Crumb said, “It goes out sometimes.”
Terrific,
Andie thought and went to scope out Archer House before she made a trip to the shopping center she'd passed on the two-lane highway the day before.

The layout of the house was, for all its size, fairly simple. The center of the house, as Mrs. Crumb told her, was the Great Hall, more than twenty feet square with a stone fireplace large enough to party in. The hall rose three stories to a raftered ceiling that dated back to the original house, sometime in the sixteen hundreds, each level ringed by a gallery with that ancient wood railing that Andie had almost fallen through the night before.
Impossible to heat,
Andie thought.
And those railings are not safe.
There were six rooms on each floor: one room on each side of the hall at the front of the house, and four rooms across the back. The first floor had empty rooms in front, and the kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and library across the back; the second floor had two bedrooms in front and four in back, all with four-posters and naked mattresses; and the third floor had Mrs. Crumb's bedroom on the front left and Carter's on the front right, and then Andie's room, the doublewide nursery, and Alice's room across the back. In between the front rooms and the back were staircases—the narrow servant's flight behind a discreet door on the left and the massive formal stone staircase through an equally massive stone arch on the right. A long, white-paneled, red-carpeted entrance hall separated the rooms on the right from the Great Hall, but otherwise it was pretty much two rooms in front and four in back all the way up. Every room in the place was covered in dust, the paintings on the walls looking muddy and faded in the gloom and the bedrooms on the second floor doing a nice business in cobwebs and the occasional dead mouse. Jessica the ancient blue-faced doll would have fit right in there. Still, Andie was cheered by her ability to navigate the stone barn she was living in, so when she had the scope of the place, she went back to the library where Carter had folded his gangling body into a deep, red-cushioned window seat.

Tauruses like things,
Flo had said, and even though astrology was a crock, Andie thought,
Books.

“I'm going out to shop,” she told him. “Want to come along? There's a bookstore.”

“There's no bookstore in New Essex,” he said without looking up.

“Is that the little town at the end of this road? There was a shopping center I passed on the highway about half an hour before I got to New Essex. It had a bookstore.”

He stopped reading. “Grandville?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and went back to his book, and Andie took that for assent and went upstairs to find Alice, wondering what sequined promise would lure a little Scorpio out of the house.

Alice was in the nursery with her Walkman, dancing and singing “Gloria” at the top of her voice. She caught Andie watching and stopped, her colorless skin and straight white-blond hair making her look like a little ghost herself, almost translucent in the morning sun.

“I'm going to town to shop,” Andie said. “If you come along, I'll get you a new bedspread. With sequins.”

“No,” Alice said automatically.

“Carter's coming.”

“No he's not. We don't leave here.”

Andie came into the nursery and sat down on the ancient rocker near the TV. “Why?”

“We belong here.”

“Alice, it's just for the day. We'll be back for dinner.”

“That's what
she
said,” Alice snapped, her stolid little face growing grimmer.

“She who?”

“Nanny Joy. She said we'd just go for the day and then she kept driving and driving and driving, and when Carter said where are we going, she said we were going to a new home.” Alice's hands were curled into fists now, her face even whiter than before. “I'm not going.
I'm not going! I'm NOT GOING! NO NO NO NO NO NO
—”

Andie said calmly, “Alice, all my stuff is here. I wouldn't leave my stuff.”

“NO NO NO NO NO NO—”

“All my clothes are in my room,” Andie went on. “Boxes of your school supplies. My sewing stuff. I didn't bring all of that here yesterday to leave it today.”

Alice closed her mouth and regarded Andie darkly.

“Do you want to see the boxes?”

Alice thought about it and nodded.

“Okay then.” Andie stood up and held out her hand to the little girl who ignored it to march toward the door to Andie's room. She wrenched open the door and stalked in, and Andie followed her in and opened the closet door. Alice came closer to stare inside, suspicion in every cell of her body. “I'm unpacked,” Andie told her. “Why would I do that if I was going to take you away?”

Alice ignored her to kick the sewing box.

“So do you want to come with Carter and me to go shopping?”

Alice set her lower teeth in her upper lip, thinking hard. Then she turned and marched back into the nursery.

Andie grabbed her purse and keys and followed her into the nursery in time to see Alice go out of the nursery and slam the door. “Wonderful,” she said, and was trying to think of something else to bribe the girl with when Alice came out with her blue Jessica doll under her arm.

“I want a blue bedspread with sparkles,” she said, “and it should flutter. Like butterflies. Or dancing.” She headed for the door out of the nursery and onto the gallery and beyond that, presumably, the stairs and Carter.

“Hold it,” Andie said, and Alice turned around, a dark look on her face. “We have to comb your hair.”

If possible, untangling Alice's hair was worse than Andie had anticipated since Alice screamed through the whole thing, loud enough that Carter came up to see what Andie was doing to her. “You're next,”
Andie told him over a shrieking Alice, and he left and came back five minutes later with his hair combed, in time to see Andie pull Alice's hair up into a topknot and tie it with one of her scrunchies.

Andie sat back to survey her work. Except for the fact that Alice was still screaming, tears streaking down her contorted, red face, she looked pretty good. “Alice, I'm not doing anything to you. Stop screaming and go look at yourself. You look cute.”

Alice screamed louder, directing the volume directly at Andie, so Andie went into her room and got a hand mirror and brought it out to her. “Look.”

Alice stopped in mid-scream, possibly because she realized she looked god-awful with her mouth open like that, possibly because it had been so long since she'd seen her face without hair sticking out all around it. “I hate it,” she said, but she said it instead of screaming it, so Andie counted it as progress.

“That's my girl,” she said, standing up.

“I'm not your girl,” Alice said, and stalked out the door past Carter, clearly fed up with Andie and life in general, although she gave grudging approval to Andie's yellow Mustang when she saw it.

The ride to Grandville was uneventful except for the one bad moment when Andie drove through New Essex and turned onto the highway, and Alice thought she was being kidnapped again. She screamed until Carter, sitting beside her in the back seat, said, “Chill, it's the next town,” without taking his eyes off his comic book. Alice stopped. Evidently if Carter said it, it was fact.

“Thank you,” Andie said to him, looking in the rearview mirror to see his face.

He ignored her.

When they got to the mall in Grandville, he got out of the car and headed for the bookstore. Andie and a silent, glowering Alice went to a bedding store for a blue comforter for Alice and a red-striped one for Carter. When Alice objected to hers, saying, “It doesn't have sparkles,” they went to a fabric store for some blue sequined chiffon and thread, and after that an office supply store where Alice picked out a sketchbook for Carter, and a set of markers,
a big pad of quarter-inch grid paper, some pencils with skulls on them, and a pencil sharpener, all without interacting with Andie in any way until Andie offered her a set of Hello Kitty pencils. The scorn on Alice's face was searing.